Anyone here a statistician?

[Stubble]

Nessie, you don't understand, I want to know disposition of individuals. I want a head count into and out of the camps.

Statistical projections are not what I am after with this endeavor.

This is also an aside, and I apologize for the drift in topic.

I want to know who the Germans had where and when. I also want to know disposition. Died? Released? Unclear?

I'll start another thread about this when I begin cracking into the sources provided by Mr Check.

We know areas were 'depopulated'. You claim to know that this 'depopulation' resulted in death. I'm not so sure. You have jews in these camps being released to family and all other manner of discharge. That's what I want to look at and tally, among other things.

I want to build a cohort of those who could have been murdered, then I want to try to determine their last known location.

I'm looking for missing persons. Just as I have been doing with the cohort of Hungarian jews.

[Nessie]

Nessie, you don't understand, I want to know disposition of individuals. I want a head count into and out of the camps.

....

I can help with that. Hofle stated that 1,274,166 had arrived at the AR camps. Eric Hunt complied this list of known transports back out of the camps;

https://studylib.net/doc/7233192/trebli ... ist-edited

It is a few thousand.

[Stubble]

Well, thank you Nessie. I will take a look at this.

It appears I am getting mired in sources currently and there is much winnowing to be done.

I will likely be submerged in this stuff for a bit. I will surface occasionally for fresh air and to charge batteries.

Edit: of note, that link provided has AIDS and I don't see a way to download the presentation. If anyone has a downloadable pdf link for this, I'd appreciate that greatly.

[Archie]

I'll take a stab at it. Under orthodox assumptions, Hitler killed six million Jews. This is more than the number of Jews he had, so he achieved a more than 100% kill rate. Except obviously there were at the very least a couple hundred thousand survivors. Such contradictions make it tricky to calculate an overall probability here since the numbers will never be consistent. But no matter. We'll just have to try our best. For Auschwitz, I have heard a survivor figure of around 10,000. Let's go with that as a starting point. This would be out of a denominator of 1M+. Hence let's say that under orthodox assumptions, the implied probability of surviving Auschwitz was around 1%. At Treblinka it was around 0%. Outside of Auschwitz it's harder to say but it could not have been much better. Let's posit 1% as our initial overall assumption. You could argue for a probability perhaps as high as (9.5-6.0)/9.5 = 37% based on the entire prewar Jewish population in Europe but this would include Jews in Russia, Britain, France, and many who left earlier. Here we are talking about a family within Hitler's reach where at least some were deported to Auschwitz.

Let p be the overall probability of a Jew surviving the war. If for simplicity we assume independent risks,

Joint survival probability for two brothers = p*p

For a 99% death rate, that would be (1/100)^2 = 1 in 10,000 (for the unconditional probability)

More realistically, family members would NOT have completely independent risks because they would often be living in the same towns and so forth. So survival of one may be correlated with higher survival for a given "pocket." But good luck trying to estimate that. We could try to argue for a higher survivorship probability by saying a given pocket was "special" but remember that we have the restraint that the survival probability for Jews in general has to be extremely low.

Okay, then. On the Montel show, they picked out an Auschwitz survivor to appear, so this in itself is not miraculous. We would need to condition on his selection for the show. (We could point out here that there seem to be a lot of these "rare" survivors available for these media appearances but we can set that aside for now). For the conditional probability, the show did not select for the brother's survivorship. That probability should therefore be low. How likely is it that the brother who "died in the Holocaust" was actually alive? It might be tempting to say p^2 (ignoring postwar mortality) but it would actually just be p because it's conditional on one survivor already being selected. If he had died, he wouldn't have been on the show. So let's say there would be around a 1% chance his brother had survived the war and just a fraction of that that he survived until the 90s. This is not astronomical, but it was certainly rotten luck for the Holocaust Industry that this happened when it was so "unlikely."

If we were to look at this from a Bayesian perspective, this sort of counterexample might cause us to reconsider our prior probabilities. Is the survival probably really super low? Or is it perhaps much higher? It's like if I'm flipping a "fair" coin and it comes up heads 15 times in a row, I might start to wonder if the coin is really fair. And there is yet another way this example undercuts orthodox assumptions. A key assumption for them is that it was easy for Holocaust survivors and their families to reunite after the war. What he have here is not only the improbability of survival but then also the improbability that they did not find out until the 1990s. How is this possible if international tracing is as easy as we are told? In fact it's common to lose contact with relatives even without the difficulties of people spreading out to different countries, all of whom are assuming "everyone died in the Holocaust."

If you pay attention, you will see this "reunification was easy" assumption is implicit in many of their arguments. See bombsaway here for example where he assumes it would require a vast conspiracy to prevent these reunions. If this premise is not true, then his "impossible conspiracy" argument falls apart. : viewtopic.php?t=343

Final Answer: Under orthodox assumptions, I would say that the overall probability Hollander's brother surviving the war would have been low, maybe 1%. You could perhaps argue for something higher if you argue that both of them had some unique risk profile that greatly boosted their survival odds. That they would not have found each other until the 1990s would also be fairly low probability under the orthodox assumption that this was generally easy.

[Stubble]

Part of Mr Check's objection was that the brother was never near Auschwitz.

However, given the near 160% death rate for jews in the occupied territories (surely my dataset is currently incomplete) it boggles the mind.

I need to get back to my accounting.

Archie, if we could give rep on this board, I would rep that post, then I would un rep it, so that I could rep it again.

That this happened, is in my opinion, aberrant. As you said, heads 15 times in a row aberrant.

[Archie]

Part of Mr Check's objection was that the brother was never near Auschwitz.

However, given the near 160% death rate for jews in the occupied territories (surely my dataset is currently incomplete) it boggles the mind.

I need to get back to my accounting.

Archie, if we could give rep on this board, I would rep that post, then I would un rep it, so that I could rep it again.

That this happened, is in my opinion, aberrant. As you said, heads 15 times in a row aberrant.

Right. And SC is free to argue that Zoltan had much higher survival odds, but it doesn't seem to me like the non-Auschwitz odds could be much better, at least if we are taking the whole six million thing seriously.

Also,

A few years after the war, Ernest had been told by a friend that he had personally witnessed Zoltan’s execution in 1944 by German soldiers, who supposedly hanged him from a tree.

I mean, we know that people don't make up things like this, right? Surely, the odds were very low given that there was an "eyewitness" to his execution.

[Archie]

Wait, we have an interesting development. Apparently the story is that Zoltan was hanged but managed to survive. Lmao.

Zoltan had indeed been hung by the Nazis back in 1944, but they were in such a rush to flee, they didn’t tie the knots well. Zolton fell between the trees and played dead until he could escape. He spent years wandering Europe and eventually settled in Yugoslavia, having believed his entire family had been murdered in the war.

https://aish.com/holocaust-survivors-mi ... s-brother/

[SanityCheck]

Some of the probabilities are best understood at a national level since this also relates to possible itineraries and how families were divided.

Hungarian Jews were as noted conscripted to the HLS, with large numbers sent to the Eastern Front in 1942, many were captured by the Soviets and died in POW camps. Hungary was then directly invaded by the Red Army, which increased the risk of any individual being arrested and interned by the Soviets after 1945. Not much more than half of the Hungarian Jewish population as of January 1941 was deported to Auschwitz, with quite varied fates for others, including the Budapest ghetto and the forced marches in November 1944 to Austria.

By contrast, the Soviets were never anywhere near France, while three quarters of Jews in France survived in hiding and escaped across the borders to Spain and Switzerland (in smallish numbers), 75,000 were deported to camps in Poland with one transport to Kovno, whose survivors were evacuated. The 2500 returning survivors of the deportations included French Jews liberated at Auschwitz in January 1945, some of whom were back in France by April, after being repatriated very rapidly via Odesa and Marseille. The Soviets had significantly less reason to be suspicious of French nationals they encountered in the eastern half of Europe - and they even seem to have given up the French nationals who'd been conscripted by the Germans quite quickly.

Archie is right to note that families did not have independent 'risks' but this is already clear in the case of the Hollanders. Of nine family members, one was never deported to Auschwitz and was separated from any reunion by the Cold War, eight were deported to Auschwitz with four killed on arrival, the father died in the KZ system, leaving two brothers surviving, for a total survival rate of three out of nine nuclear family members.

This contrasts with other families who might survive almost intact in hiding, especially in western Europe, or with families like the Franks, who were in hiding in the Netherlands, got caught, the father survived the war, Anne Frank did not. Having survived selection at Auschwitz at a very late stage in 1944, it was not so likely Anne Frank would die in a gas chamber, but her risk increased by being transferred to Belsen.


The comparison with Anne Frank also highlights a variable which is much more extensive than any Holocaust or Hungary related considerations. Anne Frank encountered friends in Belsen and was known to be with her sister Margot; one does not have to accept any claims by belated witnesses to accept that both clearly did not survive Belsen.

But there are literally millions of eyewitness reports from memory of the deaths of individuals in WWII, and large numbers of inferences by eyewitnesses. Veterans routinely note the deaths of comrades or commanders in their accounts without necessarily having accesss to personnel records - and in circumstances where the dead comrade might not have been buried (a formal burial being more memorable, but still ultimately a matter of memory for most purposes). This includes lots of reports of Soviet killings of Germans at the end of the war, and all kinds of reports of Germans killing non-Germans across Europe.

Ernest Hollander was told by someone who knew Zoltan that he had been hanged from a tree by the Germans - the hanging was apparently correct but not the death. This is a classic case of mistaken witness testimony, which is not so different to seeing a comrade shot down at a distance or someone being taken away and hearing a shot.

For the purposes of declaring legal death after a period of being missing, as well as for the purposes of historicity, this is perfectly valid evidence. Compare with the summary execution of Hermann Fegelein outside the Berlin bunker in April 1945. I'm unaware if anyone recovered his body (i.e. if a Soviet investigation did), all we have to go on is eyewitness testimony. That is staggeringly normal.

Now, a very small proportion of otherwise valid eyewitness testimonies and hearsay testimonies to someone's death turn out to be inaccurate due to misperception or misinformation. A classic example was Otto Ohlendorf deciding to finger Bruno Streckenbach as the person passing on a Hitler order before 'Barbarossa'. The choice seemed to depend on Streckenbach having disappeared. Little did Ohlendorf know that Streckenbach was in Soviet captivity and would return alive in 1955 to unravel the conspiracy to claim superior orders. By then of course Ohlendorf had been hanged several years back, but others in the conspiracy were now confronted by an unexpected shock.


It's clearly quite rare for an eyewitness to observe what they think is someone's death and be wrong about it. The theoretical possibility might delight defense lawyers in court cases, but as a practical matter of historicity (what happened), then the only way to impeach the testimony from wartime conditions is for the person presumed dead to have survived and resurface. Otherwise they remain 'missing presumed dead', a colossal category for service personnel in the era of world wars. Thus the great fussing over MIAs from Vietnam and other wars.


So Zoltan Hollander's survival contrary to what Ernest Hollander had been told is indeed remarkably rare, but not impossible.

[Stubble]

Why is it any time you scratch the varnish on a holocaust story, the whole thing catches on fire and burns to the ground?

We have a brother, hung 'improperly' because apparently 'Ze Germans' don't know how to fish and can't tie a knot, which, is totally true by the way, and not suspicious at all, and should simply be taken at face value.

Then we have this;

Ernie and his seven siblings lived happily with their father and mother until the Nazis invaded and murdered his father before his very eyes.

Except earlier I read this;

eight were deported to Auschwitz with four killed on arrival, the father died in the KZ system, leaving two brothers surviving, for a total survival rate of three out of nine nuclear family members.

The layers and layers and layers and layers...

But, it's totally not statistically significant that this happened folks, this kind of thing happens all the time, nothing to see here, move along.

I'm going to go get my shovel and get back to digging. I just wanted to drop this in the thread because I figured I'd take a break and read Archie's link. I didn't make it very far before I spit out my fresh cup of coffee (now I need to brew another one...).

[SanityCheck]

Right. And SC is free to argue that Zoltan had much higher survival odds, but it doesn't seem to me like the non-Auschwitz odds could be much better, at least if we are taking the whole six million thing seriously.

Depends on what you find so improbable. Surviving a hanging seems not so improbable, given the number of reports of botched hangings that have to be repeated, in diverse circumstances - it's not like the Nazis were uniquely bad or uniquely efficient hangmen.

If you bring up the total death toll in the Holocaust, then we can see there are currently zero claims falsely reporting someone as gassed at BCST by an eyewitness. Any 'I thought you were dead!' cases would involve believing someone was deported, or not realising they'd evaded a selection at the departure end, or had managed to jump from a train.

There are also zero mistaken claims of 'I saw you enter the gas chamber' for Auschwitz-Birkenau. There seem to be a few cases where friends/relatives were separated inside A-B and might have thought the other was taken away in an internal selection, which is not so unreasonable, especially in the 1944 transit camps where selections for outgoing labour transports happened alongside selections of unfit inmates. So far no claims based on a selection on arrival.

Cases involving shootings have a prior probability set by all shootings including on the battlefield, which we could limit to the first half of the 20th Century perhaps, to model the proportion of automatic weapons compared to later in the 20th Century, and since rifles and pistols were generally the same. There are certainly many reports of survivors of mass executions of POWs - Private Pooley at Le Paradis, the Malmedy massacre survivors - and there are more for Holocaust related mass executions. Nothing improbable about these at all. Playing dead is quite commonly reported in battlefield/massacre situations.

[Stubble]

Wait, is there an implication here that nobody saw this fellow go into the homicidal gas chamber?

https://www.historiography-project.org/ ... genbelsen/

[curioussoul]

I want a head count into and out of the camps.

The entire crux of the Holocaust story is the fact that there is no record of what happened to the Jews not registered in the camps, so a "head count" simply is not possible. Whenever you read about a transport of Jews being "gassed on arrival" at Auschwitz, all that means is that X amount of Jews arrived in the camp and were given registration numbers and accomodation in the camp, whereas the remaining Jews "disappeared". Often times you'll see a transport of 1,500 Jews arriving, 500 of them being registered in the camp as inmates, and the remaining deportees are not mentioned anywhere. Exterminationists insist these Jews were categorically gassed on arrival, but there is no evidence they were. Indeed, revisionists have been able to demonstrate that "missing Jews" from some of these deportatation trains ended up in different camps, or never arrived in Auschwitz in the first place, demonstrating that the mere lack of record does not prove that Jews were gassed. Revisionists say that these "missing Jews" were in fact transited further east, into the Occupied Eastern Territories, which was the official policy of the German government at this time.

In regards to the Reinhard camps, there is significant evidence that careful records were kept for these camps, but that they were destroyed in early 1944. A secret report by Odilo Globocnik, a key figure in Operation Reinhard, reveals some interesting details about the recordkeeping at the Reinhard camps, demonstrating that records did at one time exist but were destroyed. For Auschwitz, there is, as far as I'm aware, no evidence the Germans ever documented the transit trains taking non-registered Jews further east.

[SanityCheck]

Wait, is there an implication here that nobody saw this fellow go into the homicidal gas chamber?

https://www.historiography-project.org/ ... genbelsen/

No implication; only Moshe Peer made these claims about himself, which nobody believed or believes. No corroboration for his story exists, it's an obviously delusional claim. This says practically nothing in relation to the sum total of Belsen or Auschwitz survivors, especially since the claim was made fifty years after the events.

The most far-fetched claims, delusions and lies have very little significance if you don't address the cohort as a whole. No individual story however ridiculous negates the average or the sum total.

The carefully curated revisionist collection of ridiculous stories is actually rather stale - we're back in the 1990s again, looking at a few individuals out of 50, 100 or 200,000 accounts and testimonies since the 1940s. Even if reduced to KZ survivors there would be 100,000, to Auschwitz survivors probably 50,000 in all.

And these categories include non-Jewish witnessses. Which is already a problem for the sometimes hinted at attempt to slime Jewish witnesses for coming up with tall tales or being especially fanciful. By how much? Culture matters, but Jews in the 1940s were raised in several dozen national-linguistic cultures and several more political cultures, which could easily override religious culture. Any argument on genetic, ethnic or racial grounds is going to fail utterly for that reason.

Age, professional experience, education, technical experience, all would logically influence how witnesses make sense of what they saw or heard about, and how they expressed themselves when recording their experiences. Primo Levi, the atheist assimilated university-educated chemist, was 24 going on 25 when deported to Auschwitz, while Elie Wiesel was 15 going on 16, and grew up in a religious Yiddish-speaking household. Levi wrote his main memoir in 1946, Wiesel didn't start writing his until after 1952. Levi's memoirs have had much more impact and reach in Europe and Britain than Wiesel's, whereas Wiesel was and is more popular in the US.

Both are still in print, unlike Moshe Peer's worthless piece of crap.

[Stubble]

Delusional claims likely merit their own thread.

I will say 'A Year in Treblinka' is unironically cited as a credible source...

[SanityCheck]

I want a head count into and out of the camps.

The entire crux of the Holocaust story is the fact that there is no record of what happened to the Jews not registered in the camps, so a "head count" simply is not possible. Whenever you read about a transport of Jews being "gassed on arrival" at Auschwitz, all that means is that X amount of Jews arrived in the camp and were given registration numbers and accomodation in the camp, whereas the remaining Jews "disappeared". Often times you'll see a transport of 1,500 Jews arriving, 500 of them being registered in the camp as inmates, and the remaining deportees are not mentioned anywhere. Exterminationists insist these Jews were categorically gassed on arrival, but there is no evidence they were.

This is incorrect. Incoming transports and selections were noted in contemporary sources, including the Sonderkommando manuscripts and the camp underground reports, as being taken to the gas chambers and killed there. Some of these are quite specific and dated, others generalised, all are still evidence. The Auschwitz album photo-documents the sorting of an incoming transport of Hungarian Jews and has a section on 'unfit Jews' who are photographed disturbingly near to a crematorium. The Sonderkommando photographs include a blurry image of naked women walking towards something, which is similarly circumstantial evidence, but the written contemporary sources are direct evidence. Also rather direct is one of the 1944 air photos which when magnified at the behest of Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman revealed a line entering one of the crematoria.

Then there are the testimonies of the Sonderkommandos, the SS and some prisoners who observed gassings or their aftermath. The greatest volume of material is from those selected for work who observed those considered unfit for work being taken away. These sources run into the many 10s of 1000s all told, including many thousands from 1945. Some might state 'I never saw my relatives again', some then note being informed shortly after arrival that those taken away were considered unfit for work and had been gassed.

A number of testimonies note things like "with regard to our family, the SS men told us we should see them again on the following Sunday, which of course was never the case" (Affidavit of Herta and Sieglinde Hoffmann, 28.9.45, Lübeck, AIPN NTN 124, p.200, about the March 6-7 1943 transport from Berlin). Other transports or survivors on them don't seem to have been told this, but there is a clear pattern of lying and false promises by the SS.

For some 1942 transports, there were pre-selections at Cosel for the Organisation Schmelt camps, which left testimonies of survivors confirming they'd been taken off the trains before reaching Birkenau. In some cases there were then no survivors from the trains reaching Birkenau, even if some had been selected for work. But the pattern across entire series from the Netherlands, Belgium and France is more than indicative, and there are still contemporary sources noting the killing of incoming transports from these countries in this time-frame.

The sources on specific actions and individual transports are therefore more numerous than the simple contrast between camp registration number series and the documented size of an incoming transport. Danuta Czech's Kalendarium or Auschwitz Chronicle does not integrate the number of survivors known from each transport (where this was worked out) or reference their accounts; doing so would massively expand the size of the work.

Sources on specific actions from individual countries or phases, such as the Salonika ghetto transports in 1943, multiply also when taking into account what the various groups of witnesses in the camp - Sonderkommandos, SS, Birkenau inmates - said about these cohorts. The Vrba-Wetzler report and Hoess's statements from his first interrogation onwards are in the right ballpark for the size of this wave of transports from Greece, they make further remarks about them, as do other witnesses, while the camp underground reports also note the arrival of transports from Greece.

Indeed, revisionists have been able to demonstrate that "missing Jews" from some of these deportatation trains ended up in different camps, or never arrived in Auschwitz in the first place

No, they haven't. To be completely clear: there is no evidence that anyone from the selections between July 1942 and May 15 1944, which the sources indicated above point to being killed on arrival, ended up in another camp. Nor is there any evidence of registered inmate selections being transferred to another camp. All known transfers in this phase were of registered inmates who were alive (and thus also left more testimonies of what happened when they ended up in Neuengamme, etc).

From May 15 to October 1944, things shifted because of the 'transit camps' inside Birkenau and outgoing transfers of unregistered, untattooed inmates who had been selected as fit for work. But these transfers were extensively documented, showing up in the records of other KZs, and leaving extensive testimonies from the Hungarian Jews, Lodz ghetto deportees, etc. That still leaves a wholly unexplained deficit (over 300,000 Hungarian Jews) which was massively reported in contemporary sources and testimonies, and also photographed from various angles, as a killing action.

Revisionists say that these "missing Jews" were in fact transited further east, into the Occupied Eastern Territories,

Since there are zero sources indicating outgoing trains were lined up in precise readiness to take away the unregistered deportees, where precisely in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex were these outward bound transitees held while awaiting the arrival of the outgoing transports? What evidence is there for this holding site or series of holding sites?

This is humouring revisionists at most, since the answer is there is no such evidence, while the surviving train schedules and lists of Sondertransporte for a few time-frames in which we know there were incoming transports selected on arrival at Birkenau, simply don't indicate any scheduling of outgoing trains.

But this is a genuine firebreak or bottleneck question, which I don't think revisionists have ever acknowledged, even though being able to describe and reconstruct *how* 'transit' worked would surely be much more persuasive than vaguely handwaving about 'transit'.

There might be rumours and guesswork recorded in often very distant wartime reports, e.g. from western Europe guesses that deportees were going to xyz place in the east, but literally none of them ever mention Auschwitz, so they're not sources for transit via Auschwitz. Moreover, the number of such guesses and misdirections declines in 1943 after the initial flurry of speculation in 1942, leaving some actions with few or no rumours, and more and more reports of Silesia or Poland, eventually with non-Polish underground reports of transports to Auschwitz, before Vrba-Wetzler confirmed the suppressed Polish underground reports that had reached London.

The choice, then, is between the sum total of all accounts left by the 2500 survivors of deportations from France (while there aren't 2500 memoirs or lengthy accounts extant, there are many hundreds available) and all corroborating sources from the camp underground, other inmates, etc, versus the grab-bag of vague wartime rumours and guesses, some of which reference impossibly sized trains arriving in Romanian-controlled territory, which breaches the laws of physics as much as diplomatic common sense.

To be repeated for every national group.